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Vodafone Spain supplies pre-Mariposa'd smartphone (again)

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Vodafone Spain has again supplied a HTC Magic smartphone that came pre-infected with the Mariposa botnet client and other malware crud.

The second incident, involving an Android-based phone supplied to a researcher at S21Sec, comes a week after the mobile phone giant supplied the same type of infection on the identical model of phone to a worker at Spanish anti-virus firm Panda Security.

The S21Sec pre-pwned smartphone kerfuffle undermines Vodafone's assurances at the time of the Panda flap that the incident was "isolated and local". Both smartphones were ordered at around the same time towards the beginning of March.

We spoke to Vodafone on Wednesday, making it aware of the second HTC Magic/Mariposa infection in Iberia. Vodafone stuck by its original line that the problem was "isolated and local" but added that it hadn't experienced the problem outside of Spain. A spokesman added that its investigation is continuing. "Even one infection is one too many," he added.

Dos veces

The S21Sec worker detected the malware after he plugged it into his PC using a copy of AVG's scanner. Aware of Panda's previous work, he forwarded an infected microSD drive to PandaLabs Pedro Bustamante, who carried out an analysis published here.

"According to the dates of the files, it seems his Vodafone HTC Magic was loaded with the Mariposa bot client on March 1st, 2010 at 19:07, a little over a week before the phone was delivered to him directly from Vodafone," Bustamante writes.

"The Mariposa botnet client itself is exactly the same as reported last week, with the same nickname and same Command & Control servers."

The circumstances of the infection point to problems in Vodafone's QA or with a specific batch of phones rather than a stray infection of a refurbished phone.

Oddly, Vodafone UK reportedly discontinued distribution of the HTC Magic two days after the original Panda-related incident in favour of supplying HTC Tattoo as its sole Android device. Vodapone Spain continues to supply the HTC Magic, however. ®